Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Capstone

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Physician Assistant Studies

Committee Chair

LaDonna Clark

Abstract

Introduction: Skin cancer is a serious, yet preventable disease that impacts individuals worldwide. Skin cancer is treated through both surgical and non-surgical interventions. Designed to preserve healthy skin tissue, Mohs surgery has shown favorable outcomes in lessening skin cancer recurrence. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether Mohs surgery is superior to traditional surgical excision in reducing recurrence rates in patients with skin cancer.

Methods: PubMed was searched for clinical trials to assess the effectiveness of Mohs surgery compared to surgical excision in cancer recurrence. Five articles were selected for clinical review.

Results: In 5 studies, there was an overall reduction in skin cancer recurrences among patients with various types of skin cancer. All studies used a 95% Confidence Interval (CI) to determine the plausibility of data. Most studies included a p-value to gain a better understanding of the data’s accuracy. Two studies evaluated basal cell carcinoma skin cancer. Alsaif et al.9 reported a significantly lower recurrence rate for primary basal cell carcinomas with Mohs micrographic surgery compared to surgical excision (OR = 0.27; 95% CI between 0.15-0.46). Thomson et al.10 found recurrence risk of 19 versus 32 per 1,000 lesions with Mohs micrographic surgery compared to 29 versus 52 per 1,000 with surgical excision at 3 and 5 years. Three studies focused on cutaneous melanomas. Bittar et al.13 reported recurrence rates of 0.61% with Mohs micrographic surgery, 1.8% with staged excision, and 7.8% with wide local excision. Crum et al.12 discovered a 0.5% disease-specific mortality rate following Mohs micrographic surgery. Williams et al.11 reported no statistically significant difference in local recurrence risk between Mohs micrographic surgery and wide local excision. Overall, the five studies demonstrated a clinically relevant reduction in the skin cancer recurrence rates with the use of Mohs surgery when compared to other surgical interventions, such as surgical excision.

Discussion: Mohs micrographic surgery has proven efficacious for treating skin cancer and eliminating overall recurrences. Further investigation is needed to evaluate the efficacy of Mohs surgery across varying skin cancer types and anatomical locations.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Download

Share

COinS